4 ms·

> Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW (Assuming you mean MWh here and it's just a typo.). Where are you getting those nu

> Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW (Assuming you mean MWh here and it's just a typo.). Where are you getting those numbers Lazard's estimates that I linked have solar at $130-$230/MWh when charging directly from the grid, and $85-$160/MWh when charging from attached solar which shares the same inverters. (And for additional duration, just add more batteries and discharge them at less power) So if you blend 50% stored electricity with 50% delivered from primary renewable generation at a fraction of the cost, it's way below nuclear's costs. Finally, we don't even really know that those are nuclear's costs. We haven't finished Vogtle, so we are at scientific-wild-ass-guess stage of how much it will be when it finishes. Go back 10 years and the estimated cost of nuclear is almost reasonable, but every single year that we have had Vogtle delays and cost increases, the general estimates of nuclear's cost goes up. We don't know when it will stop going up, until we have a few more reactors built. And when you add in the cost of potential construction failure, like at South Carolina's Summer addition, started at the same time as Vogtle, nuclear goes up even more. People always overestimate the potential of nuclear, for some reason, and reality bites them. In contrast, people always underestimate the potential of storage and renewables, and reality delights them. It's time to reset our expectations based on the copious amounts of data we have collected over the past decade.

Manuel_D 4y ago
No, the units are being mixed up. 100 MW / 100 MWh under "Levelized cost of Storage" means "storage of a capacity of 100 MWh, that can be released at a rate of 100 MW". So if I have a 100 MW solar plant, and I want it to run for 4 hours after sundown, I need 100 MW / 400 MWh of storage capacity. So it's that storage cost, plus the cost of 100 MW solar generation that yield the net cost. Why not just measure in MWh? Because storage is useless without means to put that energy back in the grid. The electrical transformers to do this are not insignificant. So 100 MW / 100 MWh is more than a quarter of the cost of 100 MW / 400 MWh because of this overhead. Current nuclear builds have indeed been expensive, the plants last a long time. As per your own source, it's still less than intermittent sources when you include the cost of storage. Furthermore, Lazard is not examining the transmission infrastructure needed o support low-density sources like solar and wind. So, yeah, despite the expense nuclear is still the most cost-effective option. Furthermore, Lazard's estimates about nuclear are actually quite conservative. Nuclear plants were cheaper when built at scale. During the 1960s through the early 1980s, nuclear plants were often built for less than a quarter of what present builds [1]. Nuclear doesn't need technological improvement to get cheaper, it needs the economy of scale that previous plants enjoyed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Bear in mind that generation is only part of the holistic system of energy delivery. Intermittent sources require storage, which is separated out into a separate chart. Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW. Solar is not $30/MW in any part of the world. The raw module cost is $200/MW (gross) presently and might reach $30 in an optimistic 2050 scenario. Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost. > And 4 hours of storage is pretty thin - most plans call for 12 hours of storage. And storage costs are only projected to increase: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik... > By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...) There's no reason to compare a peaking storage facility to a net capacity buffer one. For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load? Put it in a battery on site and decrease the size of your solar farm's inverter. You need to add an efficient buck charger for the battery but that will cost much less than the money you saved from the smaller inverter. At current grid storage prices of $260/kWh you need about 7 years. Give it a year for price spikes related to EV adoption to settle and you only need 3 years -- sodium ion batteries are well on the path to industrialisation. In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Now I'm having trouble following your use of units: > Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost. Do you mean MW here? Capacity costs is nowhere near $15 / MWh. > For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load? This is why storage costs include both the output and the capacity. 100 MW / 100 MWh is different from 100 MW / 400 MWh. Why would someone use a 1:1 output to capacity ratio? So that renewable builders can advertise "100 MW of storage", without actually specifying the actual capacity. In fact some plants have a output to storage ratio less than 1. I've seen 200 MW / 100 MWh facility before. > In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable, I think you're misunderstanding that figure. It's the levelized cost of energy: meaning every $200 MWh of energy stored and retrieved, you have to pay $200, or $0.20 per KWh. Existing energy costs are less than that. In the US it averaged $0.16/KWh. Storage alone would amount to more than what we currently pay for electricity, for half the energy we use. And remember you need to add generation, and transmission costs on top of that.

Manuel_D 4y ago

No, the units are being mixed up. 100 MW / 100 MWh under "Levelized cost of Storage" means "storage of a capacity of 100 MWh, that can be released at a rate of 100 MW". So if I have a 100 MW solar plant, and I want it to run for 4 hours after sundown, I need 100 MW / 400 MWh of storage capacity. So it's that storage cost, plus the cost of 100 MW solar generation that yield the net cost. Why not just measure in MWh? Because storage is useless without means to put that energy back in the grid. The electrical transformers to do this are not insignificant. So 100 MW / 100 MWh is more than a quarter of the cost of 100 MW / 400 MWh because of this overhead. Current nuclear builds have indeed been expensive, the plants last a long time. As per your own source, it's still less than intermittent sources when you include the cost of storage. Furthermore, Lazard is not examining the transmission infrastructure needed o support low-density sources like solar and wind. So, yeah, despite the expense nuclear is still the most cost-effective option. Furthermore, Lazard's estimates about nuclear are actually quite conservative. Nuclear plants were cheaper when built at scale. During the 1960s through the early 1980s, nuclear plants were often built for less than a quarter of what present builds [1]. Nuclear doesn't need technological improvement to get cheaper, it needs the economy of scale that previous plants enjoyed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> Bear in mind that generation is only part of the holistic system of energy delivery. Intermittent sources require storage, which is separated out into a separate chart. Even just 4 hours of storage would bring solar's $30/MW to $210 to $350/MW. Solar is not $30/MW in any part of the world. The raw module cost is $200/MW (gross) presently and might reach $30 in an optimistic 2050 scenario. Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost. > And 4 hours of storage is pretty thin - most plans call for 12 hours of storage. And storage costs are only projected to increase: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik... > By comparison nuclear costs $131-$204/MW, so it's still cheaper after storage. The Lazard estimate also didn't include the transmission expansions necessary to support the distributed nature of renewable generation (explained further here: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...) There's no reason to compare a peaking storage facility to a net capacity buffer one. For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load? Put it in a battery on site and decrease the size of your solar farm's inverter. You need to add an efficient buck charger for the battery but that will cost much less than the money you saved from the smaller inverter. At current grid storage prices of $260/kWh you need about 7 years. Give it a year for price spikes related to EV adoption to settle and you only need 3 years -- sodium ion batteries are well on the path to industrialisation. In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable,
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Now I'm having trouble following your use of units: > Solar LCOE for recent projects is $15-50/MWh depending on climate and land/labour cost. Do you mean MW here? Capacity costs is nowhere near $15 / MWh. > For the use case of 8-12hr storage you can use the same inverter and frequency matching equipment as the solar panels use. If transformers are a cost factor then why would you transform the energy three times at 4-6x the needed power load? This is why storage costs include both the output and the capacity. 100 MW / 100 MWh is different from 100 MW / 400 MWh. Why would someone use a 1:1 output to capacity ratio? So that renewable builders can advertise "100 MW of storage", without actually specifying the actual capacity. In fact some plants have a output to storage ratio less than 1. I've seen 200 MW / 100 MWh facility before. > In the counterfactual world where you're offering guaranteed $130-200/MWh for 60 years and guaranteed loans and free insurance building such a system from solar and battery would be immensely profitable, I think you're misunderstanding that figure. It's the levelized cost of energy: meaning every $200 MWh of energy stored and retrieved, you have to pay $200, or $0.20 per KWh. Existing energy costs are less than that. In the US it averaged $0.16/KWh. Storage alone would amount to more than what we currently pay for electricity, for half the energy we use. And remember you need to add generation, and transmission costs on top of that.